


Restoration

by Anonymous



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Loss of Identity, M/M, Mind Control, Transformation, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-15
Updated: 2014-10-15
Packaged: 2018-02-20 23:15:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2446676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frigga comes home. All is not well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Restoration

Odin's wife returns to him on the day the mortals have named after her, hidden among Thor's Midgardian companions.

(To think in his terrible hurt that he had almost denied Thor permission to allow his Midgardians the glory of gazing upon Asgard, when all along she waited among them to come home.)

He is speaking alone with the metal-smith – surely one of Völundr's, for all he scorns worship and magic even as he performs it – when she reveals herself.

He does not know where the smith, the so-called iron man goes upon leaving to give them privacy. He doesn't even know when he goes, for Frigga, beloved Frigga is all he can see.

(Despite the grief this will bring, he cannot bring himself to regret his single-mindedness.)

She listens as he pours his grief and loss to her, shouldering the burden he has been crumbling beneath and bearing it with ease. Frigga's eyes are as bright as when they were newly-married millennia ago, as if her brief sojourn to Freya's field has only rejuvenated her, and her smile is kinder than he has seen in centuries, no longer worn by the weight of royalty or the grief of motherhood. Odin dares to hope she has forgiven him for being too slow, not saving her from that accursed creature.

"As if I have ever needed you to save me," she says and he smiles for the first time since her funeral.

He tells her he is sorry that they had been arguing so fierce and often before she… left. He understands now that she will never back down where Loki – where either of their sons are concerned, and that he had grown too obstinate in recent years to listen as he should to her wisdom. Perhaps if he had...

He forces himself to confess that in his terrible heartbreak he almost cost them their son and their kingdom both, unable to see past his desire to be reunited with her.

"You give Thor too little credit," she says, laughter in her voice, not a trace of doubt in Thor and his decision. (How bright her smile, her firm her devotion). Of course, of course she is right, his queen.

He tells her his heart cannot contain his joy at having her returned to him.

Her smile wavers as she remembers something of their parting, grows dim with recollection. "I have missed you too," she says.

*

Thor weeps when he sees Frigga, as open and honest as a babe in her arms once more. Though he towers over her he folds himself down that he should be the one held in comfort and it strikes Odin's heart to see them both so. Loki had never cared if any saw his mother embrace him, for Loki has – had – ever been an odd and shameless creature, still childlike in his acceptance of his mother's touch even before company, but once a man grown, Thor had complained and shifted free as soon as possible - _please, mother, not in front of the Einherjar_.

Now he holds her tight and minutes of their eternity pass as he cries into her shoulder.

"Thor," Frigga says, patting his broad shoulders, her slim hands made small against their son's bulk. "Oh, Thor, I've missed you so."

She looks almost startled at her own words, for she has always prided herself on her queenly restraint.

"Mother," Thor says, such joy in his voice any lingering hardness Odin feels for his defiance in the circumstances with the Aether is lost.

His family is whole again.

*

Frigga sits beside Thor and speaks earnestly to him all the while her return is celebrated around them. She barely lifts her hand from his forearm for a single moment, but her expression turns increasingly strained and horrified and Odin knows then that Thor has begun to speak of Loki.

A fine warrior's death, more than any ever expected of Loki, but still her mother's heart obviously bleeds to hear it. Odin takes her other hand and she startles as if surprised. It has been too long since he showed his care for his queen before others, he decides.

Has he truly sunk so far into his king-self that he has forgotten how a husband treats his wife?

Sharply the memory of Loki pricks his conscience, his pale void-touched son in elaborate chains hearing he will never see his mother again. If he felt even a quarter of the love Odin feels for Frigga, it is no surprise that he would have considered that the greater part of the punishment.

"Mother, you must meet my friends," Thor insists and gracious as ever she looks upon the mortals he claims and smiles. There is one of them missing, the smith – of course she would like to meet that one, she has always enjoyed hearing of others' crafts – but they claim he has probably found his way into a dwarf's forge and refused to come out.

Not even a city-wide proclamation fêting the return of the Odin's wife would make him turn away from new knowledge, they laugh, as if it is not an insult, his absence, but Frigga nods in understanding for she has ever been the same with her weaving.

"You will introduce him to me later," she tells Thor, smiling. "It would be a shame not to meet all your new friends."

"Of course," Thor says, beaming, and she sighs in contentment.

"I am home," she says, and Odin brings her hand up to his lips and presses a dry kiss against the skin.

*

Frigga rises to follow the mortals when they claim exhaustion and repletion and Odin has to catch her arm and remind her that their chambers lie in an entirely different direction.

"I had not finished conversing with them," she says, her eyes following her son wistfully.

His wonderful queen, she has never lost that openness to other cultures, even those as brief and unstable as those of mortals, vanished almost as swiftly as they were learned.

She follows him through the halls, tugging restlessly at his hand, looking everywhere as she has forgotten the way, as if it is all new to her. He is reminded of their wedding night and their first walk to their shared bed, how eager she had been to see everything, how he had to keep his hand tight around hers, as he does again now, to keep her from running to explore every new sight that enthralled her.

She had been very young then, the lovely white-armed Frigga, as had he.

Their kisses then had not the familiarity of centuries, and with Fólkvangr's air lingering in the scent of his wife's hair they have that newness again.

Their joining once more as husband and wife is fierce and joyous, though she cries out in discomfort more than once as they relearn each other, even so brief a parting (though it felt like centuries to him) enough to make their bodies clumsy with forgetting.

"I love you, I love you, I love you," she chants, clawing at his back, and he sinks into her arms and weeps at the thought that she could have been lost to him forever.

*

Frigga spends much of her time watching Thor's mortals, always eager to seek them out and speak of their little world. Odin indulges her – so many centuries he has been forced to tell her no regarding things dear to her heart, or told her to reconsider, or turned his will against hers for the sake of their kingdom. And how that cost him, when she stood in defiance between Thor's pitiful Aether-stricken mortal and Malekith.

He can deny her nothing now. If she asked for Loki's pardon he would be forced to grant it.

(He does not believe Loki dead. He refrains from telling her so, for she would insist – as she did upon his fall – upon scouring the nine realms for him and if he could not be found her heart would break once more. And if he could be found… Loki might lash out – Odin places nothing beyond Loki any more, no action so low he might not attempt it – in his rage at discovering his trick has failed.

If Loki _does_ live – his body was not recovered, after all – he will come to them. How could he possibly stay away upon hearing of the miracle of his mother's return?)

The mortals welcome her presence gladly, as they should, though they grow increasingly worried and distracted by the absence of their smith, who has still not returned from wherever it is that he cannot hear the celebrations of all of Asgard or pull himself from his distraction to wonder at the return of their queen.

Secretly, Odin finds it fitting that his wife be returned but a mortal lost. It is mere coincidence, of course, but he cannot help but wonder if it is the price asked by the universe for Frigga's homecoming. If so, then let the mortal remain beyond even Heimdall's sight.

*

She has nightmares now, his beloved Frigga, though of what she has not the words to express.

"The void," she tells him, still struggling and fighting with the memory of it while safe in his arms and he thinks she speaks of Mistress Death's dark eyes.

He holds her tight, trying to be comforting, but her fear is such she struggles and cries out as if she does not know him, or as if he is a monster wearing her husband's skin to trick her.

As Frigga grows paler and quieter and more strained, more the queen of recent years than the girl of her youth re-discovered in Fólkvangr, Thor's mortals seem to grow ever angrier and more upset in contrast. They have outstayed their original welcome, insisting upon remaining until their missing warrior is found. Generous with delight at Frigga's own return Odin has allowed them to do so, but the more time she spends with them the more withdrawn Frigga grows.

They are upsetting her, Odin sees. He finds it in himself to insist they no longer burden her with their lost companion and their worries, knowing well he is going against Frigga's will once more.

She is outraged, of course, but when he takes her in his arms she surrenders almost instantly, stiff and still as she listens to him beg her to allow her mind to settle before being forced to confront their loss again; it clearly reminds her too much of their own parting.

She cries out with frustration at her own weakness, insisting she is fine. She beats upon his shoulders with rage as he guides her to bed, but she yields to his touch as a hawk to the hood, a brief snap of rebellion before acceptance. It has always been so when she is angry with him.

(She stifles her tears beside him later in the dark, but cannot still the quaking of her body. He forces himself to remain still. This too will pass.)

*

"Nobody has seen him!" The copper-haired shield maiden is furious and rightly so. Odin would of course help as he knows he should, but his wife is here when he thought her lost and no more can he stand to spend a minute more apart from her than he has to. Leave her side for the sake of a mortal? No. The laws of hospitality fade to nothing next to his desire to keep his wife close and safe.

"Thor says _Heimdall_ can't see him –"

"It must be like asking someone to spot a single specific leaf in a forest," the captain worries. "Perhaps he simply can't –"

"No," says the man whose mind Loki twisted to borrow his sharp eyes. "If he could see Tony, he could see Tony. Anyway, he's not quite that all-seeing, Loki's got his means against him – sorry, Thor, I mean, Loki _had_ his means against him – whoever's holding Tony might too –"

Come away, Odin tells his wife, following their progress along the hall with her eyes. Come away.

She feels too deeply, fretting over even such brief-lived creatures.

Perhaps she is reminded of Loki, dark and solitary even among companions, quick and clever and always disappearing into his studies as this mortal apparently has. Odin knows that was _his_ first thought upon seeing the smith, that she would adore him, for like Loki he too shared her nature and held in high value traits she praised in their second son.

Forget one little mortal. Why grieve when she is home once more?

("There was much to fear from your grief," Heimdall says. He does not look at Odin. Perhaps he still fears punishment for his part in Thor's treachery, going against Odin's grief-stricken orders - his temporary madness, Odin sees now, and is grateful enough to be generous. "You look... better, my king."

"How could I not?" Odin says, and Heimdall bows his head.

"I do not see the mortal," he says at last.)

*

As Loki had grown in magical strength he had become ever more adept at slipping into places he should not have been, quicker and quicker at subverting Odin's own defenses for the sake of causing trouble.

He had taken any alteration to Odin's wards as a challenge for his own skills, no matter how deadly they became or how narrow his escapes. Odin had decided once Loki had at last managed to evade one without leaving even a trace of himself behind that the thing to do was to let Loki believe he had been successful in besting them or else he would kill himself in his prideful need to conquer in the only arena he could.

He added but one last trick, a harmless piece of magic, to always recognize Loki's own unique seiðr, that Odin would always know when Loki trespassed – that if his son came upon more trouble than that he intended to make, Odin and Frigga could find and rescue him from his folly if need be.

It was never necessary and so Loki remains unaware that the instant he enters his mother's chambers Odin knows of his presence.

He gives his excuses to Thor's mortals, ignoring their outrage – they are demanding yet another search, and something about checking every citizen entering or leaving Asgard entirely – and makes his way there, perhaps being less swift than he could be, to allow Frigga time to warn her son and let him go.

Loki is still there when he enters, however, standing before Frigga as pale as milk, his face wan and sickly. His hands are shaking pressed between hers as they stare into each other's eyes.

"Loki," she says desperately. " _Loki_."

He chokes on nothing, as Odin choked to see her again bright and alive, and turns his head with terrible slowness towards the doorway, as if in his shock he has forgotten how to move. "What abomination is this?" Loki whispers.

Odin can forgive much for Frigga's sake, but not that. "How dare you speak so of your mother?"

"Mother," Loki chokes, and his eyes are wild, mad, and with sinking heart Odin thinks he is even worse than before. "This is not my mother."

Frigga lunges to stand before him, shielding him before Odin can even begin to raise a hand against their false child. "No," she says, frantic, "No, no, no," and behind her Loki clasps his hand to his mouth as if to hold back vomit.

Whatever it is he sees or hears as he stares at Frigga, it is not the woman who raised him. Odin feels more compassion for him than he thought he would ever manage for Loki again after his remorseless killing of Laufey, the attempted destruction of his own race. The void has left its traces upon him deeper than first thought, and Odin had thought them cavernous.

"Loki," he says, tries to gentle his voice as he would with a spooked horse, guide him back to something like sanity, "whatever it is you think you see –"

"What I see?!" Loki says, voice rising with incredulity, cracking in upon itself with disbelief as if Odin is the broken-minded one. "You think I don't know how to break your glamors now, having been under your best and strongest for centuries? Even if I did not, the void has shown me how to grasp things previously beyond comprehension; your glamors are as _cobwebs_ to such sights –"

"Loki –"

"What is this, what have you done –"

"Nothing," Odin says. "My wife is returned to me whole and safe and you would complain?"

"I would – you –" Loki says, and he grasps Frigga's wrist, pulling her back towards him, shielding himself from Odin's truth. "You have gone _mad_ ," he breathes.

Odin stares at his lost child, so pitifully broken he sees his own madness upon others before he can recognize it in himself.

"You have – oh Norns, does Thor – does Thor know –"

"Loki, _please_ ," Frigga says, tries to turn and comfort their son, but he keeps tight hold of her that she cannot face him.

"Do not, do not," he whispers, one hand going to her throat as if to circle it, and Odin is filled with sudden terror that Loki is so crazed he might actually kill his mother believing her to be replaced by some glamored creature –

Inexplicably – or perhaps not, for Frigga has always loved Loki too dearly and never really believed he could bring true harm to anyone – she relaxes at his touch. She still trusts, even his insanity, that he will know her and stay his hand.

Odin does not.

(He will not lose her, not again, never again –)

"Let her go," he warns, infusing his words with all the warning and strength of will he can muster, an echo of the voice that belonged to battlefields of millennia ago, facing Loki's monstrous forebears.

Loki laughs, an awful, staggered gasping, but he knows just how far he can press and his hands fall away.

"Loki –" Frigga says, whirling, reaching out for him – when he had just _threatened_ her, his indomitable, infinitely compassionate mother – and he vanishes just as Odin's spear drives into the far wall at the height of his head.

Odin runs to her, taking her in his arms as she stares at the empty air where Loki had been.

"No," she says quietly as Odin vows to alter the wards, make it impossible for him to return, to threaten her again. "No," she repeats, louder, as he tries to comfort her that he will not let Loki's madness touch her, he'll keep her safe from his misplaced rage. "No! No!"

Too much, the sight of her heart-son so ill and damaged, too much, his rejection of her, spurred by his shattered mind though it was. His noble queen breaks in his arms and will not be comforted of her loss.

(He will make Loki's execution swift, Odin decides, that he can never hurt her like this again.)

*

("You are _wrong_ , you must be wrong –"

"Even I would not lie about this!"

"But mother – father –"

"I swear, upon my magic, my life, _her_ grave, whatever it will take to convince you, I'm telling the truth –"

Odin rounds the corner but the whisperers are gone, merely lingering ghosts of a time long past when he had two sons and might have heard them arguing so.)

*

"Where is mother?" Thor asks, quiet, wary.

(Has Odin truly been so draconian in his desire to protect her that even his son doubts his welcome?)

Resting, she is resting. Weary of celebrations and struggling against the nightmares of when she left them she has taken to her bed. Her maids are watching over her, making sure she is safe.

"Did something… happen?" Thor has no talent for deceit, always content to let Loki deal with such necessities, and his concern is plain on his face. He has heard something, some rumor that makes him doubt his own father.

Frigga needs her rest; that is all. Odin is sure she will be happy to see him once she is feeling in better health.

He does not speak of Loki, though he knows the loss still weighs heavy on Thor's heart. Loss can both make and break a king, as Odin well knows, but it looks as if Loki's is the making of Thor. In any case, he has not forgotten his solemn oath to remove the source of Frigga's grief. Better that Thor does not allow false hope to grow in his heart.

Thor nods, glancing at his mortal followers, always close by these days. "Of course," he says.

There is something different about the Midgardians. Odin counts them, one, two, three, four, five –

They found the missing mortal, then?

"Yes," Thor says, something sickly in his smile at the sharp-eyed look the man gives him, so like Loki in their youth when he doubted Thor's ability to lie true to their mother. (He was right to do so, as Thor never could - though of course Loki himself was little better.) "That was originally what we came to say –"

Odin tells them he is glad to hear it, and he truly is, some knotted emotion uncoiling into relief.

(Frigga is safe, he thinks, and then doesn't know why.)

They will return to Midgard on the morrow then, and the smith nods once, a grim look upon his face as if a challenge had been accepted.

*

"If you're lying," whispers the berserker, and the smith cuts him off instantly.

"Not about this, never about this," he says. He smiles at the maidservant that brings him another glass of mead and drinks as if dying.

Green tinges the berserker's face, his war-self straining to be free though there is no battle to fight in Odin's feast hall, not even a careless challenge from one of Thor's warriors who somehow hasn't heard of what the berserker did when confronted in jest fresh from the Bifröst.

"Calm down, we'll fix this. It's my specialty, isn't it, fixing things?"

The berserker shudders and nods, green fading from his skin but lingering in his eyes.

Muninn flies to Odin's shoulder and whispers of what they spoke. Odin feeds his raven still bleeding meat and dismisses the berserker's stare.

*

Frigga is not well enough to leave her chambers and say farewell and Odin forces himself to do so in her stead, for she will never forgive him if she thinks their son went once more to that backwards little realm of which he is so fond without at least one of their blessings.

Odin's eye keeps catching upon the smith, fully armored as if he expects battle at any moment, his helm under his arm his only concession to propriety. His face is heavily shadowed and gaunt in a way it was not just the evening before. He stares at Odin with eyes hot with hate and mouth twisted with pity.

Does Loki truly think him so easily fooled?

He will let him go, for Frigga's sake, but it is almost insulting how Loki cannot bring himself to conceal his hatred even at the potential expense of his freedom, and that he believes Odin so blinded he will not notice it.

The Midgardians surround what they believe to be their friend, tense as if waiting for some blade to fall. It is only when Odin nods to Heimdall that they relax into the Bifröst's glow.

He wonders if they already have an inkling of the changeling among them.

*

Frigga is standing at her window, her back to him as he enters, stiff with disapproval.

It is hardly Odin's fault he cannot keep their son from lavishing his time upon mortals. He will return soon enough, he assures her, reaching for her shoulders –

She turns before he can touch her and the light glances across her face in such a way that he knows suddenly that he has been tricked. 

Loki darts under his hands, teeth bared in a grim smile.

He glamored Frigga to look like the smith, Odin realizes, in such a way that he would believe her to be Loki performing the pretense and therefore dismiss mistakes large and small in his eagerness to see him gone –

"It was not her, it was never her," Loki hisses, his venom-bright eyes deadly with his belief. "You poor grief-blinded fool!"

Odin roars his outrage, but his fury makes him careless, as he has often warned his children to be wary of in battle. Loki evades him with ease.

He conjures up an image of Frigga and the smith somehow overlaid, the smith begging Thor to hear him as Frigga tells him she missed him, but is is far from Loki's best work and Odin dismisses it with ease.

"She is dead," Loki cries, and his tears would fool almost anyone else as to his honesty. "Dead, and you in your madness –"

_Odin's_ madness? The only mad one here is Loki, unwilling to accept the miracle of Frigga's return –

"Father," Thor says from the doorway and Odin whirls to face him. He too has tears upon his cheeks.

Thor will understand, Thor will help him retrieve his wife, Thor's mother –

"No, father," Thor says. "Loki speaks the truth here. You glamored the man of iron in your grief –"

No

"– convinced yourself she had returned to you – to us –"

No

"– trapped him so thoroughly in her shape his every word and action became hers and he could not ask for help no matter how he tried –"

What poison has Loki been dripping in his ear, how has he managed to convince Thor of this foolishness?

"Father, you are ill," Thor whispers and behind him Loki gasps as if the air itself is toxic, heavy with the poison of his lies and he cannot breathe for false grief.

(I love you, I love you, I love you, murmurs Frigga's voice, and beneath it screams the smith, _I hate you, I'll kill you, I'll kill you_ , and they merge into one, Frigga whispering she hates him, the smith spitting that he loves him.)

Wrong, they are wrong, Loki has tricked Thor again, as he always has and will, but this time Odin will not stand for it, this time he has gone too far –

"Please, father," Thor says. "Please do not make me –"

He will go to Midgard if he must, find Frigga again, and they will be happy once more –

" _Brother_ ," Loki says.

Thor's face hardens. Above his damp cheeks his eyes become flinty, determined. He raises Mjölnir and calls the storm.

**Author's Note:**

> For [this prompt](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/19023.html?thread=45071439#t45071439).
> 
> In an AU where Loki did not take the throne or kill Odin and instead fled to think of some other plan, so Odin is still King. 
> 
> Still grieving for Frigga, Odin allows the Avengers to visit at Thor's request, and in Tony he sees something that reminds him of his dead wife. He speaks to Tony alone and in his grief, and madness, he glamors Tony into Frigga, and truly believes Tony is Frigga come back to him. 
> 
> Tony tries to tell him that he's not Frigga, but the glamor turns all his words and all his actions into something Frigga would do or say, so he's effectively trapped and everyone around believes he's Frigga as well.


End file.
